Hacker News Reader

Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

Reading the article it's tempting to say sometimes it borders on ridiculousness :) .

> No one, in the Unix world, ever complained about the Unix's missed promise about file abstraction.

The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions :) .

Being fully aware how the same things could look very different from different angles, I'd still maintain the "not broken - don't fix" approach has been countered then and now.

View on HN

> The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions :) .

There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016. The compiler, for example, lacks a modern optimization pipeline and generates code that is unacceptably slow by modern standards. The windowing system is not a compositing window manager; it's a '90s design through and through and cannot perform as well as solutions like Wayland (that are arguably simpler). The browser doesn't support dynamic changes and would have to be rearchitected to support anything more than simple pages with acceptable performance.

None of this is meant to bash the great work that the Plan 9 team did while at Bell Labs/Lucent, mind you. With the team they had they did a really great job, and they're all top-notch developers. I only want to counter the notion that Plan 9 is all around a technically better OS than the ones we use today. It isn't.

As sad as it sounds, most complexity exists for a reason. There is a good amount of cruft that could be dropped if not for backwards compatibility, but when e.g. compilers are concerned, you depend on that complexity for performance.

> There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016.

Well yeah, that's because Plan 9 wasn't written in 2016 and hasn't been kept up to date. I don't think anyone claimed otherwise.

It doesn't invalidate the point that people do want a simpler OS that isn't as crazy and hodge-podgey as Unix. They just don't want it as much as they want compatibility with old software.

Think how hard a sell Windows 10 would be if it didn't run software written for Windows 7. Literally no-one would use it. That doesn't mean it isn't better.

> The windowing system is not a compositing window manager

8½ perhaps wasn't, but Rio is a compositing window manager.

Not in the modern sense of compositing GPU buffers.

Since when does the window manager have to use the gpu to be considered a compositing window manager?

This has devolved into a fairly pointless semantic debate. What I'm saying is that rio is not built around compositing hardware surfaces, like all modern windowing systems (DWM, Mac CGS, Wayland) are. A windowing system that is not architected this way will always have inferior performance, and retrofitting the proper design onto an existing one based on memory buffers and drawing commands is difficult to do (see all the problems with XCOMPOSITE).

The UNIX haters book is a good example.

And I coming from the world of Amiga and Windows, after a decade mostly spent on UNIX land, have returned mostly to Windows world in the last 6 years.

The world has gone UNIX because it was free and for free stuff, everyone is willing to live with some warts.

Had AT&T been able to sell it in first place, it probably would not have spread as it did.

Not only because it was free, but also because "worse is better".

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. ["The Rise of Worse is Better" by Richard P. Gabriel, included in "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook"]

Yeah, now all the people that make money out of security related work and tooling are thankful that they spread like that.

While UNIX has it's downsides and I have seen beautiful non UNIX OSes such as OS/2, most non-unix oses simply suck, too, and usually more.

This reminds me of my Blue Box on NuKernel idea, the idea being to later implement the Mac OS APIs in separate processes outside the box. One interesting thing it did was to use Pascal strings.

What operating systems do you have in mind? The only remaining systems (outside of academia/research) which are not based on unix seem to be windows, openvms and os/z.

Edit: thanks pjmlp. With so many name changes I forgot that IBM still had an alternative OS for small computers. I imagined that maybe there were still other mainframe systems, but I was too lazy to check...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020

Far as surviving ones, Burroughs MCP and GCOS are still around. BeOS is being cloned by Haiku. Amigas are still around with MorphOS being good. eComstation maintains OS/2. The THEOS OS and GEM(?) window system still exist. Plan 9 of course. GenodeOS continues microkernel-style tradition. JX continues language-style security trend. Oberon legacy last iterated as A2 Bluebottle OS.

So, there's several I recall.

Thanks. Apart from the mainframe systems, the ones having experienced commercial/industrial success in your list are either life-extension efforts to support niche users or are clones of the actual thing developed by hobbyists. Maybe they would suck less than unix if they had seen in the last 20 years a fraction of the development behind unix operating systems. By the way, you forgot to include FreeDOS (I don't know if DR-DOS is still alive).

"Maybe they would suck less than unix if they had seen in the last 20 years a fraction of the development behind unix operating systems."

Essentially it. Each on my list were innovative in their capabilities with some capabilities still missing from UNIX. They just didn't have economic and social momentum behind them. Far as FreeDOS, I left it off because it wasn't really innovative or worth copying. I'd take UNIX or Oberon over DOS any day. Maybe eCOS given its innovation was being highly and easily configurable.

http://ecos.sourceware.org/about.html

nickpsecurity, I missed the link in your reply. Now I think you were listing only operating systems that sucked less than unix ("did vastly better than UNIX in all kinds of ways"). And I have just realized you are not the one claiming that most "most non-unix oses simply suck, too, and usually more."

Exactly. You got me mixed up with someone else. Now, one could easily argue they sucked in some way. Especially in interfaces for some (eg mainframes, minicomputers) given they were created before PC's were invented or computers could even do much more than batch or terminal ops. Then, due to backward compatibility, they had to maintain these warts. One might also talk supported features, speed, cost, and so on for anything on the list. LISP machines got too slow, OpenVMS was too expensive, BeOS lacked Windows ecosystem, and so on.

Yet, each contributed architectural or feature innovations that are worth considering or copying to this day. Some you still can't buy on the market: Burrough's hardware security or Genera LISP's development capabilities. Some FOSS hasn't quite caught up to: BeOS's amazing, consistent, desktop experience; OpenVMS's bulletproof clustering and other availability features [1]; OS/app security of KeyKOS or EROS; low 0-days in kernel code due to use of high-level language with extra type or memory safety. So, they still kick UNIX and Windows ass in numerous attributes. Ironically, it's Microsoft and Windows trying to copy as many techniques as possible from old systems rather than UNIX. Their quality and security levels have skyrocketed vs Dark Ages of Microsoft. UNIX (or alternatives) have plenty room to grow by using differentiators like on my list.

Note: I especially encourage you to carefully read the Genera LISP machine page. Some points are obviously old news or even laughable today ("has TCP/IP"). 8-13 for debugging down to OS level and 16 are a pretty badass combo you ain't getting with UNIX, C, and GCC. ;)

[1] Maybe Amazon Web Services would've gone down less if they, instead of UNIX, were running on VMS boxes known for individual uptime of 3-5 years and cluster uptime of up to 17 years in hands of average sysadmins. Ya think? :)

Besides adopting ideas from the mainframe world in UNIX System V architecture, what improvements has UNIX had in those 20 years in what concerns modern computing architecture?

I don't know what fraction of the improvements concern modern computing architecture, but probably we all agree that there have been improvements that make it suck less in practice. I thought I was replying to the person who said that "most non-unix oses simply suck, too, and usually more." My point is that the comparison is somewhat unfair.

If by UNIX you mean *BSD or GNU/Linux derivatives then I agree the UNIX-like experience, as such has improved a lot, when comparing the BSD/GNU experience with the POSIX certified one.

However, I imagine that if I seat myself in front of a 2016's fresh installation of Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64... I will struggle to find any major difference from a 2006 installation, the last time I used any of them.

DTrace, ZFS, and containers should be major differences. Serious changes in how admins' jobs work have resulted from just those three. A whole cloud platform has been built when that was added to other benefit of open-sourcing one. So, Sun's OS got transformed into a pseudo-mainframe with better debugging and possibly better filesystem. I don't recall enough details of mainframe FS's to be sure on latter.

Far as Linux, Ubuntu with its software-center, Flash, VLC, and so on are much different than my early experience with Caldera OpenLinux on a Pentium 2. Which would've looked like shit with almost no apps or features had it not bricked that machine during install. ;)

So, they're not very innovative but have had huge improvements that totally change the user-experience. I mean, certain things are similar or the same especially on terminal end. Yet, we can't pretend like UNIX has sat still. It's just still not fixing its worst issues or learning from prior work as effectively as it could.

Yeah, but that is just copying the other OSes, mostly mainframe features that are just relevant for a few selected souls.

As for the desktop, yeah the experience has improved, but still no proper GUI stack in place, all is built on top of X architecture.

Nothing compared to the work done at Xerox, DEC/Olivetti or even what Microsoft does at MSR.

I came to me thinking how similar the coding experience in Mac OS X, Android and Windows or the whole OS stack is to the way I experienced Oberon back in the day.

Yes Mac based OSes and Android have a UNIX kernel, but when using the official APIs for applications, one would hardly notice it.

That was the brilliance of NEXT: leverage momentum of UNIX in lower layers while hiding it behind a sensible upper layer. Fixed up the graphics stack, attempted to provide better organization (failure = Mach), and provided consistent, good user interface on top. Maybe better API's, maybe not... never programmed Macs.

I've been saying for a while that a group needs to do this for one of the BSD's. Not just put KDE or Gnome on one but seriously reengineer the GUI, sounds, graphics, admin controls, and package mgmt. Smooth integration with high usability and good efficiency like Macs. Closest I've seen was Mint but had to ditch it for security reasons.

Yeah, I was a big Mandrake and SuSE (up to 6.3) fan back in the day.

I agree, but the pace of development of those systems over the last ten years is not comparable with the previous ten years. By that time unix sucked already substantially less. For example, SunOS 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10 were all released in the 1997-2005 timeframe. Only 5.11 has been released since then.

You forgot IBM i (aka OS/400) and Unisys MCP (aka Burroughs B5000) and the myriad of embedded and real time OSes or bare metal runtimes.

>The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions

It says "no one, in the unix world". People outside of the unix world are not in the unix world. The point is, unix became very popular despite being bad (or perhaps because of being bad). Even within unix, the worse a system is, the more popular it is in general (see a typical linux distro full of randomly tossed together junk).

> the worse a system is, the more popular it is in general

That's true of non-unixy systems too, see: Windows.

And by that same logic, OS X is the worst Unix.

A whole bunch of tools thrown together is pretty much the definition of an operating system.

OS X is not the worst UNIX. Darwin is kind of a shit kernel, but the user land is way more sensibly designed than your typical Linux distro (which is, as OP said, a random collection of junk).

That's because OS X's user land is based on BSD. BSD in general is a much more well thought out UNIX-like OS than Linux. When I made the switch a couple of years back, I was surprised at how simply everything fit together compared to my experiences in the Linux space.

For desktops systems, maybe, but there's a reason almost nobody delivers SAAS stuff on Darwin, even as some do deliver on Windows.

Except for package management.

Don't agree. Self contained app bundles are great. I use homebrew for some stuff and dependencies are a PITA. E.g. multiple incompatible Python versions.

>The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple.

Which is orthogonal to a broken filesystem abstraction here and there.

Besides the plan 9 userland was hardly different or better in that aspect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com